Lenovo new servers rally against Dell, HP, and IBM

Multinational computer giant Lenovo has announced the release of their new ThinkServer line of small to midsize business servers, featuring Intel Xeon 5500 processors. The servers will feature built-in virtualization from Microsoft, Novell, VMWare or Redhat, depending on customer preference. Their dual-socket version will allow up to 128 GB of RAM and up to 16 hard drives.

The servers will also feature a power saving technique that will produce lower CPU output, coupled with their small form-factor hard drives. All servers will come with a web-based management tool allowing administrators to monitor them remotely. Lenovo is specifically targeting SMBs (small to medium sized businesses).

Prices start at around $1,699 and peak at $2,699. Lenovo has undoubtedly witnessed the push by other major manufacturers to tap into the SMB market in a time when many larger businesses are scaling back data centers. Their main competitors are Dell, HP, and IBM. The ThinkServer name follows the line of ThinkPad notebooks that the company inherited from IBM several years ago. The Chinese-based company is the world’s fourth largest PC manufacturer with a revenue of over $16.4 billion.

Source: InformationWeek
Photo: Flickr

A processor by any other name

Intel has decided to play the name game. As if having different processors named “Core”, “Core Duo”, “Core 2″ and “Core 2 Duo” was no confusing enough, Intel has announced plans for a huge overhaul of their naming scheme. Not to be outdone by Apple, iCarly and pretty much everyone else, they decided to include to use a a lower-case “i” to identify different “Core” versions.

They will still sell Atom, Celeron and Pentium processors for netbooks, entry-level and basic consumption respectively. But for high-performance processors, particularly those used in servers, they will have the Core i3, Core i5 and the Core i7. An Intel blog explains:

“It is important to note that these are not brands but modifiers to the Intel Core brand that signal different features and benefits.”

Thanks, Intel, that cleared it up so well for us, but it is still not clear what the numbers mean. I am assuming they are not moving to an odd number of cores (i.e. 3, 5 and 7 instead of 2, 4 and 8 cores), which makes one wonder how this is supposedly simplified from the “Core Duo” nomenclature. Only time will tell, and while it is sure to confuse desktop computer users who usually just take the word of salespeople and end up with supposedly high-powered Celerons, the web hosting providers will want to know exactly what they are getting and really do not care about cute lowercase letters.

Source: Intel
Photo: Flickr